After the Chants: Will Britain Finally Enforce Its Own Laws?
For nearly two years, British streets have reverberated with slogans that normalized menace: “Jihad,” “Intifada,” “From the river to the sea.” Week after week, the same choreography returned—march routes that threaded past synagogues and Jewish schools, megaphones weaponized to test the limits of “context,” and a policing posture that mistook permissiveness for neutrality. Some insisted the language was merely political. Others argued that thresholds were complex. Meanwhile, Jewish families rerouted school runs, businesses masked their shopfronts on protest days, and city centers became corridors of intimidation. The question now—when even the willfully indifferent can no longer plead ignorance about Hamas’s nature and methods—is brutally simple: will our institutions finally use the powers Parliament has already given them to restore order to public space?
The predicate for action is no longer in dispute. The United Kingdom has long proscribed Hamas. The criminal law draws a line—bright, practical, and enforceable—between robust political expression and the invitation of support for a terrorist organization, between protest and harassment, between assembly and intimidation. The law did not fail; its guardians hesitated. Operational caution ossified into doctrine, and doctrine became habit. “Context-dependent” became code for paralysis. Officers were told that certain chants were “difficult,” as though difficulty itself were exculpatory. Prosecutors were left to triage the aftermath of weekends of mass mobilization when the real task was to prevent foreseeable harm in the first place.
To “spring into action” does not require new statutes, only institutional clarity and professional confidence. The public order framework already empowers police to impose conditions on processions and assemblies to prevent serious disorder and serious disruption. Those powers are most effective when coupled with advance planning that is honest about cumulative impact. A neighborhood subjected to weekly marches designed to unsettle its residents is not experiencing a series of discrete events; it is living under siege by installment. The test for imposing conditions should therefore recognize repetition as an aggravating factor. That recognition is not a curtailment of liberty; it is the condition for everyone’s liberty to be real in practice, not merely theoretical.
Prosecution must likewise move from after-the-fact management to precedent-setting clarity. A small number of well-prepared cases, brought swiftly and publicized properly, would sharpen the incentives more than a thousand press releases. Where chanting or signage outside religious premises is deliberate and repeated, the law on intentional harassment—especially where racially or religiously aggravated—should be used with confidence. Where platforms or speakers invite support for a proscribed group, the terrorism offenses should be charged without euphemism. The object is not to maximize arrests, but to restore the meaning of boundaries that have been smudged by two years of equivocation. When the line is redrawn in practice, behavior changes in reality.
Universities and student unions must accept that affiliation is a privilege contingent on compliance with the law and with basic norms of non-intimidation. It is neither academic freedom nor student representation to launder the slogans and symbology of terror into campus life and then plead “politics.” The higher education regulator and the Charity Commission ought to insist that recognized societies attest to compliance with the legal framework and the standards that distinguish criticism of a state from the targeting of a people. Repeated breaches should trigger derecognition and referral, not workshops in reputational repair.
Local authorities must recover the confidence to treat permitting as a duty-of-care function as well as an administrative one. Freedom of assembly is a constitutional good, but it is not a license to route parades through minority neighborhoods for the purpose of humiliation. Councils and police, acting together, can map “no-intimidation corridors” around sensitive sites—schools, places of worship, community centers—without impinging upon the right to demonstrate in visible, central spaces. The criterion is intent and effect: is the route designed to bring a message to the public, or to bring menace to a specific minority? In a mature democracy, the former is protected; the latter is restrained.
None of this should be read as special pleading. The same clarity must protect Muslims who face spikes in anti-Muslim hatred whenever the temperature rises. Equal enforcement is not only a constitutional requirement; it is the practical foundation of trust. A posture that prevents the doxxing of imams and the menacing of mosques is the same posture that prevents the harassment of rabbis and the intimidation of synagogues. Communities come to believe in the law when they see it shielding them and restraining their antagonists with equal, dispassionate resolve.
A final word on speech. Article 10 protects robust, even abrasive political expression. It does not protect the glorification of terrorism, the conjuring of menace, or acts calculated to harass a protected community. Two years of equivocation taught the worst actors to test the line, then step over it. A year of clarity would teach the opposite lesson. The United Kingdom does not need new slogans; it needs to enforce its own laws. If our institutions choose to act with the seriousness the law already permits, the streets will become what they once were: places where citizens disagree loudly without fearing for their safety, where liberty is upheld by boundaries that are understood, predictable, and real.
